Fat Vampire (Book 5): Fatpocalypse (4 page)

Nikki shook her head again, but Maurice nodded. Maurice was their de facto leader because he was the oldest, had been the Nation’s Deacon, and because they were all living in his house, but he didn’t like the crown of authority. Maurice’s leadership style was simple: Reginald had the most powerful mind vampirekind had ever seen, so whenever Reginald had an opinion, the group would accept it.
 

Reginald turned and began his work, filling the men’s heads with an elaborate, multi-layered lie. He told them that they came to the house to assassinate vampires, found and killed three of them, then were swayed when others came up from the basement and started crying. Luckily, the evil vampires’ sorrow turned out to be genuine and the humans came to realize that not all vampires were evil. The end.

“What about the dead people?” Maurice asked.
 

“They never existed,” Reginald said, still staring into the humans’ eyes in turn. “And in a pinch, those that did die died in a fire they set themselves.”
 

“That’s some pretty shitty arson,” said Brian. Reginald suddenly remembered that the other half of the house was on fire and that maybe, perhaps, possibly that should be addressed when they were done here.

“Yeah, well, they’re shitty arsonists,” said Nikki. “They also died crapping in their pants, then rubbing their faces with poo.”
 

“Why would they do that?”
 

Nikki kicked one of the headless bodies, apparently still holding a grudge over the slain Swedish family, and didn’t respond.
 

Reginald fed the men the lines, omitting the fecality.
 

“Why didn’t we bite them?” he asked the others.

“You all have a blood substitute like on TV,” said Claire. “You prefer it. Blood is gross.”
 

“Well, it’s true that it’s gross,” said Reginald. He told the men about the blood substitute used by these benevolent, fun-loving vampires they’d encountered. He told the men that the vampires and humans had parted on good terms. Then he piled on layer after layer of influence-boosting glamour, none of it conveyed in words, and sent the men off. They milled off across the grounds, making their way toward the destroyed section of the fence.
 

“They’ll never buy it,” said Brian.
 

“Oh, they believe it all right,” said Reginald, watching the men vanish through the shutters.

“I meant the others. Their cockroach friends.”

“Those two men are going to be very, very, very believable and convincing.”
 

“We should have killed them. To send a message.”
 

“Violence begets violence, Brian,” said Reginald. “If the humans knew we’d killed the others who came here, they wouldn’t ‘accept the message.’ They’d gather more friends, then come back with flamethrowers and tanks and bombs.”

“Bullshit. Humans have always been sheep.”
 

“Yes, they have been,” said Reginald, nodding. “But they aren’t any more.”

B
UNKER

FUELED BY REGINALD’S WARNING THAT today’s in-the-know humans had been pushed a bit too far, all of the vampires in the house stayed up for the rest of the day, peering through the shades as their burning eyes allowed, waiting for a second attack.
 

None came. The endless day dragged on with a feeling of nervous anticipation.

Maurice bitched about the loss of his Monet and his Mercedes. Nikki cried about the deaths of Bjorn and Gert and their seventy-year-old son Paul. Claire, proving that cross-species empathy was possible, did the same. Watching her, Reginald felt guilty about his own conspicuous lack of emotion. Three lives had ended this morning and he supposed he should feel something. He didn’t. He decided it could mean anything. It could mean that he was stressed. It could mean that he found the humans’ motivation to kill understandable. It could mean that the last of his humanity had drained away, and he would soon become a cold-blooded killer willing to tear through a glade of necks without a thought, as Brian had done.

Around 1pm, with the sun high and strong overhead, the intercom in the foyer buzzed. Maurice checked the video monitor, saw the white van that had pulled up to the gate and the semi truck behind it, and buzzed them in. A man exited the van and approached the house. Maurice let him inside, greeted him, and then signed something on his clipboard.
 

Five minutes later, the circular driveway in front of the house was full of heavy machinery: two Bobcats, a large tractor with a front-end loader, a backhoe, a yellow bulldozer with a corkscrew auger hanging from one end. Throughout the afternoon, more equipment arrived. Humans followed and, under the direction of the man with the clipboard, began to work.
 

The amount of activity that followed was astonishing. The men and the equipment ripped out the entire black wrought-iron fence around the property and erected a sheer solid metal wall in its place that was composed of two sheets of steel spaced three feet apart. The wall was fifteen feet tall all the way around by six o’clock, at which point a neverending procession of concrete mixers began to arrive and fill the wall. The man in charge — a human named Bill who Maurice assured them could be trusted because of the insane price Maurice was paying him from his bottomless bank account — told them the concrete wouldn’t cure completely for a week, but that anyone who tried to cross it in the meantime would find themselves sinking in some rather unpleasant quicksand. And that was assuming they could get past the live electric fence wires at the top, the razor wire, and the motion-activated spotlights.
 

The men worked well into the night and then the trucks began to leave. When they were gone, Maurice announced that the house was now several orders of magnitude more secure… and all at a trifling price equivalent to a small country’s GDP.
 

Reginald went outside to survey the scene. Brian, who was more or less in charge of the house’s security, stood on the porch looking out at the new wall. The enclosure made the property darker than it had been the night before; the neighboring house and street lights had been completely obscured. Reginald came up beside Brian, arm to arm, thinking how he and the big man could be twins — if it were possible to turn muscle into fat or vice-versa.

“All of this for humans,” said Brian, his dark eyes on the new wall.
 

“Curse of being a creature of the night. When the sun is out, we’re damn near helpless.”
 

“We should have guards.
Human
guards. Like those construction guys.”
 

Reginald shook his head. “Only Bill knew whose house this really was. To the others, it was just another job for some rich guy. Bill will keep the secret because he’s paid a retainer that I’m told is very generous, and he wants this goose to keep laying golden eggs. If we involve other humans, we’re rolling the dice. Claude’s troops are killing thousands while the AVT is exterminating as many vampire colonies as it can — all of it while both sides keep smiling and shaking hands, pretending that nothing is wrong and nobody is angry. It can’t last. Soon the bubble is going to pop, and all hell is going to break loose.” He turned to look at Brian. “When that happens, do you really want humans protecting you?”
 

“You could glamour them.”
 

Reginald shook his head. “I found out about another conveniently closed loophole in the rules that govern vampires and humans. You know how humans can’t be glamoured into letting us into their homes?”
 

Brian nodded. They’d had this discussion before, back when the angel Balestro had first shown up. The whole face-off between humans and vampires was bound by ritualistic, just-because rules that prevented either side from having an advantage that might make things too easy — same as was the case in any game played out for the amusement of others.

“Well, turns out you can’t glamour them into fighting for you, either,” said Reginald. “Or killing themselves, by the way. And oh yes, there are plenty of blood traitors who like us more than they like their own kind, but they’re mostly broken people who hate themselves and love the death we represent. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to put my trust in people like that.”
 

The door opened, and Claire stepped onto the porch behind them.
 

“What’cha guys talking about?” she said.
 

Reginald looked down. He was over six feet tall and still looked small next to Brian. Between the two behemoths, Claire looked like a pet.
 

“Nothing.”

Claire put her hands on her hips. “Oh, I see. So it’s okay for me to rig an election, prevent the apocalypse, and overhear you and Nikki having sex every night…”
 

“You hear that?”
 

“Everyone in the house hears it. We discuss it at breakfast.”
 

“Oh.”
 

“… but it’s
not
okay for me to hear about killing people, or killing vampires — despite just watching four people get their heads pulled off.”
 

“Three,” said Brian. “I just drained the fourth one.”
 

“It’s okay, Brian,” Claire said with troubling nonchalance. “Those people were trying to kill us. I’m
glad
you ripped them apart.” She turned to Reginald. “And you know, I could do the same — could help defend us, I mean — if you turned me into a…”
 

“No,”
Brian and Reginald said together. Brian still had human children and Reginald had been turning down Claire’s requests to be made into a vampire for almost two full years. They both felt that vampire kids were creepy, and that turning someone who’d yet to grow up was unthinkably cruel to the person turned.

Claire sighed. “Fine. Then can I at least keep watch? I heard you saying something about day guards.”
 

“No,” Brian and Reginald said together again.
 

“It feels insulting to have to do any of this, anyway,” Brian added. “Just for
humans
.”
 

“If only we could guard the property ourselves,” said Reginald.
 

Without missing a beat, Claire said, “Why don’t you make day suits? You know, like Maurice’s brother makes?”
 

The two big men looked down at Claire, shocked. Claire’s head cowered between her shoulders like a turtle trying to hide.
 

“I didn’t know I knew that,” she said.
 

G
LAMOURED

“THERE,” SAID CLAIRE, SITTING BACK in the rolling office chair and beginning to spin in circles.
 

Reginald, Maurice, Nikki, and Brian leaned toward the computer screen despite all four having nearly perfect vampire vision. The theatrical nature of Claire’s reveal seemed to call for it.
 

On the screen was an image of a shiny metal bodysuit that looked like what might result if a leotard impregnated a suit of armor. The main piece trailed from the torso into long arms, extending to the wearer’s wrists, ankles, and neck. Laid beyond the sleeves were gloves that looked like chain mail, and laid beyond the legs were glittery-looking boots that seemed like they’d be at home on the feet of a girl band. The fourth piece, laid above the suit itself, was a hood with no visible holes in it.
 

“How do you see when you wear it?” asked Nikki.
 

“There are cameras sunk into the lead,” said Claire. She touched the screen, on the hood, where a person’s eyes would be. “It projects an image inside. A human could never use it because they couldn’t focus on an image that’s basically right up against their eye, but a vampire could.”
 

“A human also couldn’t move in a suit like that,” said Brian. “What’s the spec weight, Claire?”
 

“Depending on size, around fourteen hundred pounds.”
 

Hearing this, Reginald felt annoyingly demoralized. For most vampires, wearing the weight of a horse on their bodies would barely register, but for Reginald, it’d lay him flat. Besides, his suit would have to be twice as large as anyone else’s other than Brian’s — except that Brian could lift a stadium. Reginald could imagine himself donning one of the lead suits, then falling over and slowly being crushed until someone rescued him with a crane. It was every fat guy’s nightmare.
 

Once they’d come inside and turned on the computer, Claire hadn’t had any trouble pushing her way through the information on the web (“pushing” was how she described it, like using her hands while swimming to break water) and locating the image they were now looking at. Although Claire couldn’t say for sure, Reginald figured it could only have come from a protected part of the vampire web, from Claude’s company’s files, or from the files on Claude’s personal computer.
 

Using her spooky electron-pushing ability, Claire could easily get into any of those places, but she had no idea where she was navigating or how she’d gotten there. She hadn’t even realized she knew about the vampire day suits until the thought was summoned by Reginald and Brian’s discussion. Her odd abilities allowed her to suck information into her mind in vast torrents — but once that information was there, it became more like a cloud than a system of files, and she couldn’t consciously access any of it. It seemed to go into a kind of subconscious (or superconscious) layer within her, accessible only through whims and dreams.
 

“Claude is selling these?” said Maurice. He had a disgusted look on his face that Reginald recognized. Claude had invented wooden bullets, and although they’d never verified it, Claude’s R&D had probably helped create the “Boom Stick” weapons that Timken’s red-helmeted soldiers carried. And now, Claude was allowing vampire soldiers to walk in the sun? To Maurice, the idea would be obscene. He’d been conservative since Reginald had known him, always trying to bring back the old ways and always raising the ire of the authorities because of it. Maurice liked the idea of vampires being monsters who hid in darkness, not pretty, sparkly, sunshiny beings who dressed in couture and bantered about politics.